We were delighted to be part of the latest episode of Sarah Beeney’s Double Your House for Half the Money, where our Alpine Eiger was selected to increase the value of the home of Sarah and Jason. There is lots of evidence to show that installing a quality wood burning stove into a house increases the sale value and desirability and it is great to see that this is being championed by a prominent interior designer such as Sarah Beeney and great that she picked one of our range to showcase.
Category Archives: Cast Iron Stoves
Stoves Buyer Guide Part 2
Are Alpine Wood Burning Stoves an Eco Friendly Choice?
Wood as a fuel is an eco-friendly choice in itself. Sustainable, renewable, and if used correctly and cleanly can become a completely carbon neutral way of heating at living space/home. Wood pellet stoves burn pellets made from recycled wood waste or sawdust; don’t be shy to browse our Alpine Stoves collection. However, the flame effect of a pellet stove is not as good as a log-burning stove.
Size of Alpine Stoves
Wood burning stoves from Alpine push out far more heat than a traditional open grate where nearly most of the heat escapes up through the chimney. Heat output is measured in kilowatts and the stove size as well as the type of chimney, flue used and wood burned are all factors that determine how much heat is radiated. If you place an Alpine stove that is too big for the room, the room will become too hot on standard settings. If you attempt to run the stove continuously on a lower setting to reduce heat output, this can cause a build-up of resin. Over time, this increases the risk of a chimney fire.
Where Can Alpine Stoves be Placed?
Alpine stoves need a flue to take the expelled gases out of the room. In a large fireplace opening or inglenook, the stove’s flue pipe rises straight up the chimney, while stoves set in front of a smaller fireplace have a short horizontal flue leading to the chimney opening.
In a contemporary setting Alpine stoves can sit in the room rather than before the chimney, and the flue can be on view, rising straight to the ceiling instead of up the chimney, but beware if you have a young family, the body of the stove gets very hot so wherever you site it, you’ll need a good fireguard. The stove needs to sit on a ‘constructional’ hearth made from concrete, stone, slate or terracotta.
Stoves Buyers Guide Part 1
What would You like Your Stove To Do?
Heating up a room in your home or supplying hot water to a room has always been options but people see wood burning stoves as a lifestyle choice as well. Picking a stylish designer stove can transform any living space in your home. Whatever your home styling you live in, either a compact urban townhouse or a country cottage setting, both traditional cast iron and contemporary wood burning stoves work equally well in either home setting.
Clean Glass System
A clean glass burning system offers an unrestricted view of open flames from inside the stove. This is of course very pleasing to the eye and after all, as well as giving you with a practical heating option, a wood burner creates a great ambience as well. Without the Clean Glass system, the glass may blacken and it’s a tricky job to keep clean.
Are they Efficient?
Wood burning stoves and multi fuel stoves are all highly efficient, most stoves run at up to 87% efficiency, which compared with up to 25% for a traditional open coal fire is a great amount of difference! The most efficient wood burning stoves use something called ‘cleanburn’ technology, this works by introducing pre-heated air into the smoke at the top of the firebox that combusts the hydrocarbons from the smoke, which results in less pollution.
What Are The Latest and greatest Designs?
The styling of modern wood burners are in such a wide variety these days, they include freestanding versions, three-legged models and some that can swivel so you are able to direct the heat where you want. If you’re looking for a traditional, old-style stove in black or a colourfully painted or enamel style are very easy to find, in contrast to their period looks, they’re stuffed with modern technology. Made from cast iron or steel, stoves are super-efficient heaters; look out for eco-friendly versions that burn eco-friendly pellets, or practical boiler stoves that will heat water as well as the room.
Cast Iron or Steel?
If you’re speaking of great quality steel stove versus quality cast iron stoves then, giving that the stove is used directly with the manufacturer’s intended instructions, it shouldn’t really matter. Poor quality cast iron stoves have well known reputation for cracking under high temperature exposure, that as well as poor quality steel wood burning stoves have a reputation for warping when at high temperatures. The difference between the two types of stoves are that steel wood burning stoves heat up quicker and expel more heat to the room it is in much faster than cast iron. In which is the traditional material for wood burning stove building, since it is much heavier than steel and provides a greater mass of the metal, it tends to take longer to build up heat and expel it to the room.
In history steel was regarded once as a poor material for wood burning stove manufacturing, this would result in warped steel stoves. Steel quality however has now greatly improved so there really is not that much difference between cast iron anymore. In some cases cast iron wood burning stoves are built more heavily and more sturdy than their counterparts steel stoves, and in some cases may have the quality edge.
Cast iron stoves, which are known to be generally heavier than steel bodied stoves, they have the advantage that the mass of the metal in the body of the stove acts like a heat storage radiator dispensing the heat stored into the room for few hours after the fire been expelled. A steel bodied stove will do this too but it won’t retain its heat for quite as long. So, essentially it’s a lifestyle choice – if you need fast heat then chooses steel and if you want longer lasting heat, say overnight, then choose cast iron.